Model Behaviors

Behaviors are shared constructs that several models may adopt in order to re-use code. The ORM provides an API to implement behaviors in your models. Also, you can use the events and callbacks as seen before as an alternative to implement Behaviors with more freedom.

A behavior must be added in the model initializer, a model can have zero or more behaviors:

Each event can have its own options, field is the name of the column that must be updated, if format is a string it will be used
as format of the PHP’s function date, format can also be an anonymous function providing you the free to generate any kind timestamp:

The following behavior is an example, it implements the Blameable behavior which helps identify the user that is performed operations over a model:

<?phpusePhalcon\Mvc\Model\Behavior;usePhalcon\Mvc\Model\BehaviorInterface;classBlameableextendsBehaviorimplementsBehaviorInterface{publicfunctionnotify($eventType,$model){switch($eventType){case'afterCreate':case'afterDelete':case'afterUpdate':$userName=// ... get the current user from session// Store in a log the username, event type and primary keyfile_put_contents('logs/blamable-log.txt',$userName.' '.$eventType.' '.$model->id);break;default:/* ignore the rest of events */}}}

The former is a very simple behavior, but it illustrates how to create a behavior, now let’s add this behavior to a model:

A behavior is also capable of intercepting missing methods on your models:

<?phpusePhalcon\Tag;usePhalcon\Mvc\Model\Behavior;usePhalcon\Mvc\Model\BehaviorInterface;classSluggableextendsBehaviorimplementsBehaviorInterface{publicfunctionmissingMethod($model,$method,$arguments=[]){// If the method is 'getSlug' convert the titleif($method==='getSlug'){returnTag::friendlyTitle($model->title);}}}

Call that method on a model that implements Sluggable returns a SEO friendly title:

<?php$title=$post->getSlug();

Using Traits as behaviors

You can use Traits to re-use code in your classes, this is another way to implement custom behaviors. The following trait implements a simple version of the Timestampable behavior: